123 former death row inmates set free since 1973
 

it seems most pro death penalty people think that because the majority of people executed by the government are guilty, that everything is cool..

I guess that theory is ok as long as your not that innocent dude about to get fried.. :disgust

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source http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0804-07.htm

PS Texas still will not stop or put it on hold to allow for DNA testing and the like. Just keep frying em.

i wonder out of curiosity how many of those people were proven innocent or merely not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt..

like i imagine its pretty hard to be freed after being convicted and getting the death penalty, you would need something pretty drastic like DNA i would think , in which case 99% of the time that would prove the person was innocent , which is much more telling than merely not being proven guilty.

for example, if 2 people robbed a store and 1 of them shot the clerk and killed him , but nobody saw who fired the shot or who had the gun but someone saw 2 people standing there right before the clerk got shot. lets say one of them was convicted because the cop thought the witness said the tall guy did it.. when infact maybe the witness didnt say who shot him so he gets freed from the death penalty because he couldnt be proven BEYOND a reasonable doubt, in this case theres still a very good chance he was the murderer .

Smokey I do know a lot of overturns have been due to DNA.

I think in cases of violent armed robbery all parties are charged equally.

I could be wrong but I think they are only setting them free due to DNA

True, but it would matter when it comes to sentencing.

i know it was a bad example heh.. i will fix my example

one of them came in to rob , one of them was just a customer .. nobody has any evidence which was which but the cop misquoted the witness as saying it was the tall guy. upon re-examination of the case the witness clarified he didnt see who killed the clerk or who had the gun.

Killing people that kill people to show that killing people is wrong is inherently flawed, imho.

And that's before you even factor in the probability of killing someone who's innocent.

Those types of things are very hard to overturn. most of the overturned cases have been from DNA.

there is a movie called After Innocence. It is about people who get convicted of a crime and are later proved innocent. Most of the cases are proven by DNA but there is one in that movie that wasn't. It was a case where a guy was a cop and he cheated on his wife. He went over and banged the girlfriend then went to work. That night someone broke into her house and killed her while he robbed it. They ended up convicting the cop. They said he was having an affair, she probably wanted to go public, he freaked and killed her. His DNA and finger prints were everywhere. Five years later the real killer is caught on another charge and admitted to the crime so the cop was let free.

In that movie there is legal group that works with DNA evidence for wrongly convicted people. They said in the case of violent crimes they said that about 80% of the time the eyewitness gets it wrong. That is kind of scary.

Great, 123 criminals let loose on the streets.

yeah not good deal ..

the argument presented by the poster does break down when you look at the conditions under which most people had their sentences commuted. usually its a case where there is reasonable evidence presented that the guy sentenced to murdering a young girl because he may have been the one holding her down while his friend slit her throat etc.

not defending the death penalty, but "proven innocent" doesnt mean "wasn't there and had nothing to do with it" in the vast majority of cases.

given the insane appeals process for death row inmates, its not like there isn't adequate time to make an argument or raise questions.

obviously the system isn't one without faults and personally, i am against the death penalty for my own reasons... but the assumption of these types of discussion is "he's innocent" and thats almost never the case.